For 200 million years, turtles have been hitting the beaches to lay their eggs, we have all seen this documentary on TV dozens of times. Once the eggs are laid, without looking, they cover their eggs with sand and return to the sea.
Picture author : Jeremy Bishop Unsplash
How is this behavior born in the minds of turtles every year for 200 million years? Would there be a group of genes that activate under certain external conditions to realize a program inscribed for millions of years?
There is no free will in the spirit of the turtle, as a modern scientist inexorably seeks the origin of the Universe in the big bang, the turtle when it is time, comes out of the water and lays its eggs.
According to Eckart Tolle, consciousness is not subject to cultural time, it is immutable, without beginning or end. We can observe it by observing the observer who is in us.
We lose consciousness of our existence under the effect of anesthetic drugs, which led Stuart Hameroff to look at what happens inside the microtubules.
Who is the I who thinks in me? How are ideas born in my mind? Does consciousness precede the big bang? What is time? Man is the only animal to have a reflexive mental activity on himself while other animals go about their business without asking questions. Is this characteristic of man the product of a higher consciousness?
In the case of the turtle, it is the behavior that natural selection has selected and not the characteristics of the individual. This egg-laying behavior is of no interest to the individual who risks leaving his skin while laying on the beach, but this behavior is generally favorable to the species because a small number of individuals manage to survive and to reproduce the behavior at the next generation. Natural selection does not only select the strongest individuals, as we have often liked to repeat, it also selects behaviors that are generally favorable to the species (we could say "good"!) For example lions who are the strongest but who eat the young of their own species are neerly extinguished.
Author: The More We Know
What about the man who exhausts the resources that the species needs in less than 100,000 years!
Is DNA the support of heredity? If it is indisputable that genes induce heritable characteristics, what is the support of social behaviors?
This is an issue that deserves further research.
Paramecies are unicellular beings that have no nervous system, but that have behaviors, they are attracted in their environment by the scent of nutrients, they back the current according to the increasing gradients of nutrients. It is understandable that a species of paramecium that would not be attracted by its nutrients would be extinguished quickly. This is a chain of chemical feedbacks sufficiently self-reproductive to be selected by evolution.